In the life of each machine with moving parts, the day comes when parts wear or fail. When that day comes, someone must fix or replace the worn or failed parts. Otherwise, the useful life of that machine is over. The cause of the fault needs to be identified for the machine to continue its serviceable life.
This is true for wide range of devices and machines with moving parts and/or consumables. For example, it is true for engines, scanners, cranes, pencil sharpeners, trucks, ships, transmissions, vending machines, printers, jukeboxes, elevators, air conditioners, fax machines, pumps, trains, photocopiers, and on and on.
Herein, abnormal operation refers to the operation of a device or machine that is not consistent with its regular, productive, and useful functions. Particularly, these functions are those that are consistent with effective performance. With the brakes of an automobile, for example, the sound of metal grinding on metal probably indicates an abnormal operation. While the brakes are still operational and functional, their function is hampered. The noise indicates its abnormal operation.
For simplicity, this discussion will focus on the abnormal operation with office machinery. More particularly, it will focus on the printers typically found in the office or home environments, such as laser or ink-jet printers.
A typical troubleshooting scenario for a printer includes a customer calling a technical support center for help. The customer describes the issue to the technician over the telephone. It is technician""s goal to solve the problem; however, it is typical that she only has the information gleaned from the customer""s observations and interpretations.
For example, the customer may describe the condition as a xe2x80x9cpaper jam.xe2x80x9d Frequently, the technician asks when the jam occurs during the printer operation. Typically, the technician receives answers much like this example: xe2x80x9cit feeds a little ways and then it starts crinkling the paper.xe2x80x9d Therefore, the technician must rely on the customer""s observations and interpretations of the printer operation.
Consequently, remote troubleshooting between the customer and technician may fail to find the cause of the trouble as efficiently or effectively as desired. Therefore, an on-site troubleshooting visit may be necessitated.
Since a field technician can directly observe the abnormal printer operation, an on-site visit frequently results in extremely efficient and quick solutions for the trouble. However, an on-site visit can be quite costly compared to remote troubleshooting. On-site visits include significant overhead, such as travel, labor-costs, training, and equipment.
There are significant drawbacks to this dual-tiered troubleshooting approach (of remote and then on-site). Some of those drawbacks include:
cost of on-site visits;
a cost of field and remote technicians;
cost of training field and remote technicians;
scarceness of trained field and remote technicians;
When under warranty, the manufacturer bears the burden of some or all of the time and expense of troubleshooting (including on-site visits). Even after the warranty expires, reducing the need for troubleshooting (especially on-site visits) reduces overall operating and overhead costs. It frees up resources for other tasks.
With conventional troubleshooting, the remote technician typically relies on the observations and interpretations of a local untrained observer. While less expensive than on-site visits, conventional remote troubleshooting is less effective and efficient (with regard to problem solving) than having an on-site expert (e.g., a field technician).
Furthermore, conventional troubleshooting relies on trained personnel (e.g., remote and field technicians) to properly diagnose abnormal operation of machines with moving parts (e.g., printers).
Described herein is a technology for facilitating diagnosis of the operation of devices or machines based, at least in part, upon the acoustics of such.
One implementation, described herein, has a sound-gathering system configured to gather sound produced by the operation of a device and it has a sound-analyzer configured to analyze the sound gathered by the sound-gathering system and determine a fault-condition of the device. Furthermore, it has a fault-signature database interface configured to interface and acquire one or more fault-signatures associated with the device from a database of such. The analysis of the gathered sound by the sound-analyzer is based upon the one or more fault-signatures acquired from the database.